Rafiel saw Tom reach for the phone and because Tom had just blocked his obvious path out from behind the counter—not on purpose, Rafiel was sure, but simply by reaching for the phone—Rafiel started going around his friend, to edge behind him and reach over to open the portion of the counter that allowed egress.
He heard Tom give his cheery signature-line response to the phone and rolled his eyes. As if anyone actually would consider a greasy spoon their choice for dining downtown, no matter how many times Tom repeated it. He found Kyrie's "The George" answer far more palatable.
Touching Tom's shoulder with his fingertips, Rafiel expected to cause the other man to step away, however briefly. But instead, Tom stood, frozen. Rafiel became aware that the voice coming teensy and distant through the old-fashioned phone was Kyrie's and that Kyrie sounded hysterical. He didn't remember Kyrie ever sounding hysterical, not even when she thought she was seeing Tom die before her eyes.
The fingers he had prodded Tom's shoulder with, in a very masculine keeping of distance in a friendship type of gesture, now became a full hand laid on Tom's shoulder. "What's wrong?" he asked, as he realized that Tom had gone frighteningly pale, and that his throat was working, his Adam's apple moving up and down, as if he were trying to speak through a great lump in the way.
But when Tom spoke, it wasn't to answer Rafiel. Instead, it was a raw scream, that seemed to have been torn out. "Kyrie!"
People at the nearby tables turned to look, and Conan looked up from a bill he was totaling up. Keith and his girlfriend, too, looked towards Tom, alarmed.
"What—?" Keith said.
But Tom spoke to Rafiel, apparently having totally forgotten that shifter business was secret, or that they might be in as much danger from being overheard as they would be from no matter which arcane shifter might be threatening them or, for that matter, murdering people at the aquarium.
"It's Kyrie," he said, and swallowed. "It's the . . . creature from the aquarium. He . . . I must go. I must go to her."
And as he spoke, he tore from around his head the red bandana which he usually wore, pirate-style, while cooking, and he pulled his apron off.
"Tom," Rafiel said, in warning tones, afraid that his friend would decide to shift, right there in the diner. But Tom, clearly, wasn't that completely lost to reason. He ducked under the pass-through in the counter, and ran towards the hallway.
"Keith, take the grill, please," Tom called over his shoulder, thereby proving that he wasn't completely lost to reason at all, or perhaps that his devotion to the diner outweighed everything else, even his love for Kyrie.
Rafiel didn't stand around to see if Keith took over the grill and stoves. Instead, he ducked under the pass-through on his own, and ran down the hallway after Tom. "Let me go," he said, as Tom, in what seemed to be a blind rush, struggled with the back door. "Let me go. I can go. I can defend her."
"No," Tom said, with a sound like a hiccup. "No."
"You don't think I would fight for her?"
Tom had managed to unlock the door and now pulled it open and walked out into the parking lot, and, after looking around—Rafiel hoped he was making sure that no one was coming or going close enough to see him—ducked behind the dumpster, where he would be invisible from nearby Pride Street.
He started undressing, rapidly, rolling his clothes in a bundle. "Stay," he told Rafiel. "Give Keith a hand. I'm sorry if I was too loud in there. She's in trouble. It's not that I don't think you'd fight for her. But flying is faster."
And like that, Tom kicked his boots aside, dropped his pants and underwear in a bundle, pulled off his shirt and writhed and twisted, coughing, once, twice, three times, as his body changed shapes and textures, the smooth skin becoming green scales, the head elongating . . .
Before Rafiel could blink twice, Tom was lifting off, flying across the clear skies of Goldport towards his own neighborhood.
A curse sounded from the door of the diner. "He swore he'd tell me." There was a sound of ripping clothes. And then a red dragon rose, also, following Tom across the skies.
This was folly, Rafiel thought, particularly while journalists obsessed with cryptozoology were already suspicious of the existence of dragons in town. But it didn't seem to matter, not just now. Nothing mattered, except Kyrie.
Rafiel wanted more than anything to go and save her. He understood Tom's impulse completely. His body strained to be in the sky, speeding towards her, ready to help in any way he could. But Rafiel couldn't fly and Tom had asked him to stay here and, Rafiel realized, with Conan gone, following Tom, and Keith at the grill, there would be no one to wait tables.
There weren't many people inside, but Rafiel was willing to bet there were more people than Keith could handle on his own, while cooking. Right. He ran his hand backward through his mane of unruly blond hair, aware, as he did it, that he would be making his hair stand on end and look more lionlike than ever. Right. Sometimes your duty requires you to be a hero, and sometimes it requires you to wait tables.
He turned to do just that and opened the door to The George. As he stepped into the cool shadows of the hallway, he saw a woman's figure retreating rapidly, ahead of him.
"May I help you?" he asked.
She turned around. It was Keith's blond friend, with her much-too-thick jacket and that look she had of having been dropped headfirst into a fish tank and still not being able to tell the piranhas from the goldfish. "I was . . . looking for the bathroom," she said.
It might very well be. Well—it could be, at least. If she was as confused as she looked, she might have walked all the way to the end of the hallway somehow managing to go by two bathrooms marked with the international icons for stick-figure man and stick-figure woman wearing triangle skirt without noticing them. He would even be willing to understand this confusion if the bathrooms had been marked salmon and shad roe, but since they seemed to be marked restroom it made the confusion less likely.
On the other hand, perhaps she was a shifter. If that was the truth, she might have understood more of the conversation than she'd seemed to, and she might have been in search of further confirmation.
And yet, she still didn't smell like a shifter to Rafiel. He'd keep a very close eye on her, even as he helped Keith sling the hash or at least the burgers, and prayed with as much faith as he could possibly muster that Kyrie would be all right.
She might not be his—she would never be his—but he was not willing to face a world from which she was gone.